Papers with intent detection

45 papers
Learning LLM Preference over Intra-Dialogue Pairs: A Framework for Utterance-level Understandings (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines the scalability of LLM-generated labels with the precision of human annotations to achieve higher speed and accuracy comparable to larger models.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy across utterance-level dialogue tasks, including sentiment detection (over 2%), dialogue act classification (over 1.5%), etc.
ScopeIt: Scoping Task Relevant Sentences in Documents (2020.coling-industry)

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Challenge: a problem faced by conversational agents working with large documents is the frequent presence of information that is irrelevant to the agent.
Approach: They propose a neural model for scoping relevant information from a large document . they show that the model performs better with emails than existing baselines .
Outcome: The proposed model improves intent detection and entity extraction tasks without drop in recall.
How DDAIR you? Disambiguated Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition (2026.eacl-short)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) produce ambiguous examples with regard to untargeted classes.
Approach: They propose to use a sentence transformer to detect ambiguous augmented examples generated by Large Language Models for intent recognition.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the quality of augmented data generated by large language models in low-resource scenarios.
DSRAG: A Double-Stream Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Countless Intent Detection (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Current intent detection work experiments with minor intent categories.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses query-to-query and query- to-metadata approaches to retrieve intents from metadata.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on query-to-query (Q2Q) and query- to-metadata (Q 2M) approaches.
InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Instruction tuning is emerging in NLP, but has not been explored for dialogue-related tasks.
Approach: They propose an instruction tuning framework for dialogue that leverages natural language instructions with language models to induce zero-shot generalization on unseen tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework enables good zero-shot performance on unseen datasets and tasks such as dialogue evaluation and intent detection.
GameTox: A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis for Enhanced Toxicity Detection in Online Gaming Communities (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect toxic behavior in online gaming environments are limited by utterance-level annotation.
Approach: They propose to annotate game chat utterances for toxicity detection through intent classification and slot filling.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the detection of toxic speech in online gaming environments and reveals limitations of current models.
A Bi-Model Based RNN Semantic Frame Parsing Model for Intent Detection and Slot Filling (N18-2)

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Challenge: Intent detection and slot filling are two main tasks for building a spoken language understanding system.
Approach: They propose to use a sequence to sequence model to generate both intent and slot filling tasks together to perform the two tasks jointly.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 0.5% intent accuracy improvement and 0.9 % slot filling improvement on the ATIS benchmark data.
Investigating the Role and Impact of Disfluency on Summarization (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on disfluency detection and removal, with limited studies into its impact on downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose to incorporate disfluency in summarization models to reduce the impact of replacement disfluencies on natural language processing tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on both public and real-life datasets and shows that it can handle disfluent data with up to 6.99-point degradation in Rouge-L score and replacement disfluencies have the highest negative impact.
Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Labeling for Goal-Oriented Dialog (N19-1)

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Challenge: Neural network models have gained traction for sentence-level intent classification and token-based slot-label identification.
Approach: They propose a neural network model that performs multi-label classification for identifying multiple intents and produces token-based slot-l labels at the token-level.
Outcome: The proposed model provides a small but statistically significant improvement on the ATIS dataset and 55% accuracy improvement on an internal multi-intent dataset.
Spoken Language Understanding for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Augmented Memory Networks (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent research shows promising results by jointly learning of slot filling and intent detection tasks.
Approach: They propose a way to combine slot filling and slot filler learning to achieve state-of-the-art results.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and ATIS datasets.
RiSAWOZ: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: RiSAWOZ contains 11.2K human-to-human (H2H) multi-turn semantically annotated dialogues spanning over 12 domains . despite of substantial progress made, there are challenges in creating challenging datasets in terms of size, multiple domains, semantic annotations and complexity.
Approach: They propose a large-scale multi-domain Chinese Wizard-of-Oz dataset with rich semantic annotations that captures discourse phenomena for task-oriented dialogue modeling.
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains 11.2K human-to-human (H2H) multi-turn semantically annotated dialogues with more than 150K utterances spanning over 12 domains.
DeepStruct: Pretraining of Language Models for Structure Prediction (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pretrained language models perform structural understanding tasks that focus on understanding one aspect of the text.
Approach: They propose a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models by pretraining them to generate structures from the text on task-agnostic corpora.
Outcome: The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on 21 of 28 datasets.
Prompt Augmented Generative Replay via Supervised Contrastive Learning for Lifelong Intent Detection (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to identify all possible user intents at design time are expensive and require storage of past data.
Approach: They propose to continually train an intent detector on new intents while maintaining performance on prior intents.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms exemplar replay-based approaches on lifelong intent detection tasks and achieves state-of-the-art on four public datasets.
ConvFiT: Conversational Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing Transformer-based language models (LMs) are not effective as sentence encoders when used off-the-shelf.
Approach: They propose a method which turns a pretrained LM into a universal conversational encoder and task-specialised sentence encoder.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art ID performance across the board with particular gains in the most challenging, few-shot setups.
CM-Net: A Novel Collaborative Memory Network for Spoken Language Understanding (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing models for slot filling and intent detection fail to fully utilize cooccurrence relations between slots and intents, which restricts their potential performance.
Approach: They propose a novel Collaborative Memory Network (CM-Net) that captures slot-specific and intent-specific features in a collaborative manner.
Outcome: The proposed network outperforms existing models on two benchmarks and a self-collected corpus.
Selective In-Context Data Augmentation for Intent Detection using Pointwise V-Information (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Intent detection is a fundamental element in task-oriented dialogue systems, usually occurring within the Natural Language Understanding component.
Approach: They propose an in-context data augmentation approach that fine-tunes a pre-trained language model and synthesizes new datapoints that correspond to given intents.
Outcome: The proposed method produces training data that achieves state-of-the-art on three challenging intent detection datasets and performs on par with the state- of-the art in full-shot settings.
Exploring the Vulnerability of the Content Moderation Guardrail in Large Language Models via Intent Manipulation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prior work has shown that intent detection enhances LLMs’ moderation guardrails, but the robustness of these guardrail mechanisms under malicious manipulations remains under-explored.
Approach: They propose a two-stage intent-based prompt-refinement framework that first transforms harmful inquiries into structured outlines and further reframes them into declarative-style narratives.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms several cutting-edge jailbreak methods and evades even advanced Intent Analysis (IA) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based defenses.
Intent Detection in the Age of LLMs (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Traditional approaches to intent detection struggle with out-of-scope (OOS) detection.
Approach: They propose to use adaptive in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting to detect intent in SOTA LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed system achieves 2% of native accuracy with 50% less latency.
On the Vector Representation of Utterances in Dialogue Context (L18-1)

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Challenge: In recent years, the representation of words as vectors in a vector space has gained a high degree of attention in the research community.
Approach: They introduce a new language resource that represents dialogue utterances in vector space and captures the semantic meaning of those utterrances in the dialogue context.
Outcome: The proposed model captures relevant semantic information by comparing them to manually annotated dialogue acts.
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue Systems with Transferable Latent Variables (D19-1)

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Challenge: a lack of research on multilingual or cross-lingual task-oriented dialog systems has limited results . we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-orientated dialog systems to low-resource languages . task-focused systems are often trained with monolingual datasets that are expensive to build or acquire .
Approach: They propose a zero-shot adaptation of multilingual task-oriented dialog systems to low-resource languages using latent variables and a set of very few parallel word pairs.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better in natural language understanding task compared to state-of-the-art model . the proposed model uses very few parallel word pairs to refine cross-lingual representations .
Towards Open Environment Intent Prediction (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Out-of-Domain (OOD) Intent Classification and New Intent Discovering are two tasks in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System.
Approach: They propose a task paradigm to extend Out-of-Domain (OOD) Intent Classification and New Intent Discovering tasks in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System.
Outcome: The proposed scheme improves on existing OOD intent classification and discovery datasets.
AfriMTEB and AfriE5: Benchmarking and Adapting Text Embedding Models for African Languages (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Text embeddings are an essential building component of several NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose a regional expansion of MTEB covering 59 languages, 14 tasks, and 38 datasets, including six newly added datasets.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and mE5 in hate speech detection, intent detection, and emotion classification tasks.
Marrying Up Regular Expressions with Neural Networks: A Case Study for Spoken Language Understanding (P18-1)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that the combination of regular expressions and NNs improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available.
Approach: They propose to combine a neural network (NN) with regular expressions (RE) to improve supervised learning for NLP by exploiting the rich expressiveness of REs at different levels within a NN.
Outcome: The proposed approach significantly improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available.
Multi3NLU++: A Multilingual, Multi-Intent, Multi-Domain Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Task-oriented dialogue systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this.
Approach: They constructed a multilingual, multi-intent, multi domain dataset to support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in ToD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously.
Outcome: The proposed dataset extends the English-only dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium, and low resource languages in two domains (banking and hotels).
Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks for Open Vocabulary Slots (C18-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to filling slots that take on values from a virtually unlimited set have been lacking in the natural language area.
Approach: They propose a new attention-based recurrent neural network (RNN) model that captures the concept: Understanding the role of a word may vary according to how long a reader focuses on a particular part of . sentence.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models with respect to discovering ‘open-vocabulary’ slots without any external information, such as a named entity database or knowledge base.
Learning to Bridge Metric Spaces: Few-shot Joint Learning of Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing few-shot learning methods learn a single task each time with a few examples . but, real-world applications often contain multiple closely related tasks .
Approach: They propose a few-shot joint learning scheme that captures intent and slot relationships from only a handful of examples and adapts the bridged metric space to specific few- shot domain.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two public datasets on intent and slot . the proposed model significantly outperformed baseline models in one and five shots settings.
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for natural language understanding are based on a well-defined intent 1 ontology.
Approach: They propose to retrain the natural language understanding model as new data from real users are merged into existing data.
Outcome: The proposed model shows that the semantically entangled intents can be recognized with an automatic workflow.
Learning Spoken Language Representations with Neural Lattice Language Modeling (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for pretraining language models do not consider spoken language properties.
Approach: They propose a framework that trains neural lattice language models to provide contextualized representations for spoken language understanding tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on spoken inputs on intent detection and dialogue act recognition datasets.
Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to classify intents are labor-intensive and time-consuming as intents will be diverse and new intents may be involved.
Approach: They propose a zero-shot intent detection problem which aims to detect emerging user intents where no labeled utterances are currently available.
Outcome: The proposed model can discriminate emerging intents when no labeled utterances are available in training data.
Cross-Lingual NLU: Mitigating Language-Specific Impact in Embeddings Leveraging Adversarial Learning (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Low-resource languages and computational expenses pose significant challenges in the domain of large language models.
Approach: They propose a novel approach that uses adversarial techniques to mitigate the impact of language-specific information in contextual embeddings generated by large multilingual language models.
Outcome: The proposed approach excels in zero-shot scenarios for Latin languages like Spanish, but fails to perform for languages distant from English, such as Thai and Persian.
HCLD: A Hierarchical Framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue System (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to train task-oriented dialogue systems in monolingual datasets are expensive to build.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical framework to classify intents in high-level and slot filling in low-level . they incorporate sentence-level alignment among different languages to enhance intent detection .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves the performance on a public task-oriented dialog dataset.
Evaluating Pixel Language Models on Non-Standardized Languages (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: pixel-based models can be used to transfer learning from standard languages to dialects . pretrained language models achieve strong results for languages seen during training, but their performance declines with out-of-domain dialects.
Approach: They compare pixel-based models to token-based ones to evaluate dialects . standard german is tokenized in a more meaningful way, whereas the Bern dialect is tokenize in pixel form .
Outcome: The proposed models outperform token-based models in part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and intent detection for zero-shot dialect evaluation by up to 26 percentage points in some scenarios, though not in Standard German.
Balanced Joint Adversarial Training for Robust Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing joint models for intent detection and slot filling show insufficient robustness . however, some small changes of inputs can fool the models to produce wrong predictions .
Approach: They propose a joint adversarial training model that generates adversarials to attack the joint model and trains the model to defend against the adversarial examples.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves significantly higher scores and improves robustness on two datasets.
Joint Intent Detection and Entity Linking on Spatial Domain Queries (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Spatial domain queries have unique properties making them more challenging for language understanding than common conversational queries.
Approach: They propose a language understanding framework for spatial domain queries that jointly learns the intent detection and entity linking tasks on a voice assistant service.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods with a significant margin.
INJONGO: A Multicultural Intent Detection and Slot-filling Dataset for 16 African Languages (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Slot-filling and intent detection tasks are well-established tasks in Conversational AI, but current benchmarks for these tasks rely on evaluations of low-resource languages and translations from English benchmarks.
Approach: They propose to use a multilingual, open-source benchmark dataset for 16 African languages with utterances generated by native speakers across diverse domains.
Outcome: The proposed dataset compares multilingual transformer models and prompting large language models (LLMs) with the English language.
Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing studies on text-image content have focused on image as primary content, and text as secondary content.
Approach: They propose a multimodal dataset of 1299 Instagram posts labeled for three orthogonal taxonomies . they show that employing both text and image improves intent detection by 9.6 .
Outcome: The proposed model shows that using both text and image improves intent detection by 9.6 compared to using only the image modality.
A Novel Bi-directional Interrelated Model for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing models for slot filling and intent detection lack bi-directional interrelated connections between the intent and slots.
Approach: They propose a bi-directional interrelated model for slot filling and intent detection that uses an SF-ID network to establish direct connections between the two tasks to promote each other mutually.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on ATIS and Snips datasets in sentence-level semantic frame accuracy and improves performance on the two tasks.
ResFormer: All-Time Reservoir Memory for Long Sequence Classification (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models with quadratic time and memory complexity restrict input length . however, analyzing extensive sequential contexts is challenging .
Approach: They propose a neural network architecture that captures contextual dependencies in linear time and a nonlinear readout to model short-term dependencies within sentences.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on EmoryNLP datasets and on IEMOCAP and MultiWOZ datasets.
PCMID: Multi-Intent Detection through Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to intent detection assume that each utterance represents only a single intent.
Approach: They propose a framework for intent detection that can learn multiple representations of a given user utterance under the context of different intent labels in an optimized semantic space.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on multiple public benchmark datasets and a private real-world dataset for the multi-intent detection task.
Beyond Task-Oriented and Chitchat Dialogues: Proactive and Transition-Aware Conversational Agents (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current efforts to bridge the two modes of interaction are reactive, focusing on responding to user inputs rather than coordinating dialogue flows.
Approach: They propose a dataset designed for transition-aware dialogue modeling that incorporates structurally diverse and integrated mode flows.
Outcome: The proposed dataset outperforms baseline models in intent detection and mode transition handling.
Generate then Refine: Data Augmentation for Zero-shot Intent Detection (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing data augmentation methods rely on few labelled examples for each intent category, which can be expensive in settings with many possible intents.
Approach: They propose a data augmentation method for intent detection in zero-resource domains by using an open-source large language model and a smaller sequence-to-sequence model.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the data utility and diversity over the zero-shot LLM baseline for unseen domains and over common baseline approaches.
A Pointer Network-based Approach for Joint Extraction and Detection of Multi-Label Multi-Class Intents (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing research focuses on simple queries with a single intent, lacking effective systems for handling complex queries with multiple intents.
Approach: They propose a multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset curated from existing benchmarks and a pointer network-based architecture to extract intent spans and detect multiple intents with coarse and fine-grained labels in the form of sextuplets.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and F1-score.
Out-of-Domain Intent Detection Considering Multi-Turn Dialogue Contexts (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for OOD intent detection are limited to single dialogue turns.
Approach: They propose a context-aware OOD intent detection framework to model multi-turn contexts in OOD context detection tasks using unlabeled data.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the F1-OOD score by 29% on multi-turn OOD detection tasks compared to the previous best method.
RECIPE4U: Student-ChatGPT Interaction Dataset in EFL Writing Education (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: generative AI is expanding in education, yet empirical analyses of large-scale and real-world interactions between students and AI systems remain limited.
Approach: They present a dataset based on a semester-long experiment with 212 college students in English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing courses.
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes conversation logs, students’ intent, students' self-rated satisfaction, and students’ essay edit histories.
Text Takes Over: A Study of Modality Bias in Multimodal Intent Detection (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a new study examines the effectiveness of large language models and non-LLMs in multimodal intent detection . large-scale multimodal data integrations include text, audio, and visual inputs .
Approach: They propose a framework to debias multimodal intent detection datasets by using human evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed framework debiases the datasets and shows that mistral-7B outperforms most competitive models by approximately 9% on MIntRec-1 and 4% on MIndRec2.0.

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